Releasing software is no small feat, especially in 2018. You could just upload your source code somewhere (a Git, Subversion, CVS, etc, repo – or tarballs on Sourceforge, or whatever), but it matters what that source looks like and how easy it is to consume. What does the required build environment look like? Are there […]

A question: how long is reasonable for an ISV to keep releasing software for an older distribution? When is it fair for them to say “look, we can’t feasibly support this old thing any more”. For example, Debian 7 is still considered supported, via the Debian LTS project. Should ISV app vendors keep producing builds […]

Up to now, Linux packages on mono-project.com have come in two flavours – RPM built for CentOS 7 (and RHEL 7), and .deb built for Debian 7. Universal packages that work on the named distributions, and anything newer. Except that’s not entirely true. Firstly, there have been “compatibility repositories” users need to add, to deal […]

Releasing ISV applications on Linux is often hard. The ABI of all the libraries you need changes seemingly weekly. Hence you have the option of bundling the world, or building a thousand releases to cover a thousand distribution versions. As a case in point, when MonoDevelop started bundling a C Git library instead of using a […]

The latest stable release of Mono has happened, the first bugfix update to our 4.0 branch. Here are the release highlights, and some other goodies. Stable Packages This release covers Mono 4.0.1, and MonoDevelop 5.9. As promised last time, this includes builds for RPM-based x64 systems (CentOS 7 minimum), Debian-based x64, i386, ARMv5 Soft Float, and […]

The latest version of Mono has released (actually, it happened a week ago, but it took me a while to get all sorts of exciting new features bug-checked and shipshape). Stable packages This release covers Mono 3.12, and MonoDevelop 5.7. These are built for all the same targets as last time, with a few caveats […]

It’s been pointed out to me that many people aren’t aware of the current status of Linux packages on mono-project.com, so I’m here’s a summary: Stable packages Mono 3.10.0, MonoDevelop 5.5.0.227, NuGet 2.8.1 and F# 3.1.1.26 packages are available. Plus related bits. MonoDevelop on Linux does not currently include the F# addin (there are a […]

It’s been more than 2 years since my last post about my smartphone. In the time after that post I upgraded my much loved Windows Phone 7 device to Windows Phone 8 (which I got rid of within months, for sucking), briefly used Firefox OS, then eventually used a Nexus 4 for at least a […]

Howdy y’all Two of the main things I’ve been working on since I started at Xamarin are making it easier for people to try out the latest bleeding-edge Mono, and making it easier for people on older distributions to upgrade Mono without upgrading their entire OS. Public Jenkins packages Every time anyone commits to Mono […]

Friday was my last day at Collabora, the awesome Open Source consultancy in Cambridge. I’d been there more than three years, and it was time for a change. As luck would have it, that change came in the form of a job offer 3 months ago from my long-time friend in Open Source, Miguel de […]